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The Charity Commission said it would hold a statutory inquiry into a scandal in which Oxfam staff paid for prostitutes in Haiti in 2011. Penny Lawrence resigned as deputy chief executive of the charity, saying that allegations had been raised about Roland van Hauwermeiren, Oxfam’s country director in Chad, before he moved to Haiti. He resigned in 2011, when Oxfam referred to unspecified ‘serious misconduct’. Penny Mordaunt, the International Development Secretary, said that no organisation could be a government partner if it did not ‘have the moral leadership to do the right thing’. Last year, Oxfam received £32 million from the government. Priti Patel, the previous development secretary, said she was aware of a wider problem of sexual abuse and child exploitation. The former football coach Barry Bennell, aged 64, was convicted at Liverpool crown court of 36 sexual offences against boys aged eight to 15.
After two days of meetings on Brexit by the inner cabinet, Theresa May, the Prime Minister, promised a speech on the subject herself. But first, Boris Johnson made a speech on why he saw Brexit as ‘grounds for much more hope than fear’. Publication of a European Union paper saying that access to the single market could be denied Britain during its post-Brexit transition period, if there was a disagreement, had not been ‘in good faith’, according to David Davis, the Brexit Secretary. Michel Barnier, the European Union’s Brexit negotiator, had said that a transition period for Britain was ‘not a given’. Amber Rudd, the Home Secretary, told of an online device that could detect jihadist content and block it. Mrs May and Leo Varadkar, the Taoiseach, visited Belfast, but an expected agreement between the Democratic Unionists and Sinn Fein to restore devolved government did not materialise.
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